Ratings and Reviews by Hanon Ondricek

It took barely five minutes. You may wish to wait for more of this to be released before trying it, especially since the game wants you to maintain a browser cookie to remember your progress.

This game is brilliant, and you should play it before reading a review. No really. Play blind. Then come back. It's in Ren'Py? I think? That's the dating simulation engine where the anime characters slide in shrewdly from the sides...but this game doesn't do this - it's not annoying at all. Install this and play it. There's enjoyable music and graphics and it all works perfectly.

(Spoiler - click to show)I'm not sure I got everything out of this game, but I am a HUGE fan of meta and I love intricate recursion. So when I figured out this game was going to let me actually use save and reload to affect the story, I was hooked. It's got a lot to say about the contract between an author and a reader, and a gleeful sense of absurd humor. I almost think this even does a better trick than THE STANLEY PARABLE because there is no narrator and the author colludes with you wholeheartedly. It's almost got a bit of INCEPTION in its world-controlling aspirations.

Brilliant.

In the Stanley Parable, you play a man named Stanley who discovers all of his coworkers have mysteriously vanished. A helpful narrator guides you along and you win. That's no fun though, and the point of the game is to disobey the narrator and change the story in bizarre, surreal, and interestingly-meta ways as he not-so-enthusiastically rewrites the tale to fit your actions. It's an amazing game that everyone should play.

Cobblestone is a text version of this implemented on a minuscule scale. It's got the rude narrator and the ever-expanding clown-car of possible choices. I didn't have a lot of patience for this because I have actually *played* The Stanley Parable, so a text version without the graphics, the audio, the music, the wry British narrator, and all of the other trappings ends up becoming just an argument simulator with you holding out while the parser/author try to convince you continuously take the proffered "best" choice.

This could work as a parser game, most likely, but as a choice-based narrative, it loses a lot, becoming "Push this button. Don't push this button. NO I said push that button!" It doesn't work when all you have are two choices. In the graphic adventure (and I would surmise in a parser game) there are fewer binary choices and more freedom to disobey other than clicking wrong.

A very nicely styled Twine story. Low agency, but paced very nicely. The story is oblique but understandable, there's a little bit of gore as you are a psychic who enters the minds of the dead to get clues about their demise.

The writing is restrained, but a little bit on the nose at the beginning. The writing gets better as the story goes along and the author settles in.

I would definitely read more of this if it were a full-length novella or a slightly expanded and more interactive experience as a full-blown game. There are lots of hooks in this set up to give the reader more choice and more chances to explore and examine and interact. The author does a lot of good things with word-changing paragraphs.

This game starts off with you in the middle of a desert being led nearly naked in shackles as part of a caravan overseen by a four-breasted Slaver riding a lizard. Oh my god. How did this author read my mind?

This purports to be a class writing project. The prose is at times lurid and descriptive in a good way, in others the author snarks at the reader for making the wrong decision. It's well done, but I'd like a little more breathing room between dying points in the story. I don't know if I'm supposed to be able to survive, but my options are Run, Fight, and Reason. I can't bide my time and see where we're headed, nor, can I try to talk to a companion to see if I can start up a proper revolt. The only viable option is to run, and these each lead to binary die-or-not situations which are interesting. A potential temptress lures me in and turns into a slime creature.

I almost feel I'm reading a stealth parody of both AIF and pulp science-fiction romance. Nudity is pointed out and exploited, and the whole thing has a thrown-together 80's barbarian movie vibe that I like. I'd like more decision points and a slightly more nuanced range of responses.

I don't have trouble with my narrator being snarky and *clever*. I think the author is very influenced by THE STANLEY PARABLE, and has the potential to write to that level, but I'd enjoy more relish of the situation instead of the ones that go "Oh you're think you're so smart for turning left..." Death messages should not last an entire page.

If I go north into the sandstorm I get lost with a one word description, and there is no "retry" button. The quick restart did manage to get me to play through all the permutations I could find, I felt that it should have been available in the sandstorm death as well.

You are an ambassador attending a dinner with an alien race who value etiquette above all, and you are offered a pointed list of no-nos and names and rankings and suggestions like "don't discuss the traffic situation with this person". This leads to some instant death scenarios, ("Oh gosh, this food looks great!" !!STAB!!) but I very much appreciate what a good idea this is. It feels like a logic puzzle and has some interesting art.

An Equine Reproduction Adventure doesn't sound like an enjoyable subject for a text game, but I was surprised to find this is a medically instructional sort of interactive quiz that would help a veterinarian review procedure to diagnose a champion horse that's not breeding properly.

The interaction here is actually quite clever, hooking responses to directions, using the standard map of rooms and locations to make decisions. For example, the room description explains to go east to do a visual exam, or west to decide the problem is not with the mare. Five stars for thinking outside the box to make IF a viable medium for an educational simulation.

This is a brilliant piece of IF, and I'd call it a classic. It's a one room comedic farce told in dry Victorian sensibilities where you must coerce your hot-air balloon passenger, Mr. Booby, to relinquish a ridiculous number of heavy items he is concealing in his inventory to gain enough altitude so you don't crash and burn in the steadily approaching volcano. Delightful.

You are part of a crew of four investigating a 32 year old derelict space ship. To say that standard space exploration horror tropes ensue is sort of accurate, but not in a bad way. It's a bit Event Horizon, but this is not a story about bloody alien/demonic rampage, although violence does occur.

Instead, it's a personal narrative that plays with agency. It's more of a game than the last few Twine stories I've reviewed, giving you choices at the story level instead of the "turn right at this hallway" level, which works very well. The story can play out at least three different ways, although with the same general outcome, but each one is surprisingly different and provides a smidgin more information about what's going on.

Lots of imagery is very well-written. I especially liked the description of the sense of infinite emptiness crossing from one ship to the other, and a description of weightlessness evokes spectacular imagery in the mind.

Originally I thought there was no denouement, until I tried one of the separate paths at the main fork. It is here that the story changes. I initially believed this was a false choice and would have the story end the same way, but although what happens is the same, there are three slightly different how paths here.

I liked The Cradle of Eve a lot. It has a very sure sense of its world, and changes the endgame of the story completely depending on your choice, although there's no way to change the outcome that I actually found. On first play I thought I had the whole story, and only playing the other two branches did I get the information that I actually wanted -(Spoiler - click to show)regarding what the entity in the seed actually wants to happen- but I still wish it was made clear whether -(Spoiler - click to show)is the seed using you opportunistically, or does it care about you? Apparently it's probed your memories and use them to its advantage, so I'm curious if the seed is actually malevolent or just doing what it needs to do to get planted.

Definitely play through if you get a chance.

Beyond the title, which earned a laugh from me, the game doesn't go very much farther than to detail the "stages" of hive spider infestation, and "what to expect" exactly as it says on the tin. It's nicely written, but doesn't go very much farther than that. Less a game than a slightly interactive guide that never tries for a better joke than the title.

I guess Twine is the system of choice for expressing angst, as the last few I've opened up have provided a list of "triggers"...in this case "spiders, body-horror". That's a decent way to self-regulate, I suppose.

I hate when Twine stories keep the default sugarcane theme with no modifications, and wish that authors would scale their text up if they are never going to provide a page of text that fills down past the top quarter of the screen.